A first-principles approach to understanding the internet's router-level topology

A detailed understanding of the many facets of the Internet’s topological structure is critical for evaluating the performance of networking protocols, for assessing the effectiveness of proposed techniques to protect the network from nefarious intrusions and attacks, or for developing improved designs for resource provisioning. Previous studies of topology have focused on interpreting measurements or on phenomenological descriptions and evaluation of graph-theoretic properties of topology generators. We propose a complementary approach of combining a more subtle use of statistics and graph theory with a first-principles theory of router-level topology that reflects practical constraints and tradeoffs. While there is an inevitable tradeoff between model complexity and fidelity, a challenge is to distill from the seemingly endless list of potentially relevant technological and economic issues the features that are most essential to a solid understanding of the intrinsic fundamenta...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Lun Li, David Alderson, Walter Willinger, John Doyle
• Keywords: Network Topology, SIGCOMM 2004, Topology, Topology Generators